Occasional Papers eBook

This generation has seen no such momentous change
as that which has suddenly appeared to be at our very
doors, and which people speak of as disestablishment.
The word was only invented a few years ago, and was
sneered at as a barbarism, worthy of the unpractical
folly which it was coined to express. It has
been bandied about a good deal lately, sometimes de
coeur leger; and within the last six months it
has assumed the substance and the weight of a formidable
probability. Other changes, more or less serious,
are awaiting us in the approaching future; but they
are encompassed with many uncertainties, and all forecasts
of their working are necessarily very doubtful.
About this there is an almost brutal clearness and
simplicity, as to what it means, as to what is intended
by those who have pushed it into prominence, and as
to what will follow from their having their way.

Disestablishment has really come to mean, in the mouth
of friends and foes, simple disendowment. It
is well that the question should be set in its true
terms, without being confused with vague and less important
issues. It is not very easy to say what disestablishment
by itself would involve, except the disappearance
of Bishops from the Upper House, or the presence of
other religious dignitaries, with equal rank and rights,
alongside of them. Questions of patronage and
ecclesiastical law might be difficult to settle; but
otherwise a statute of mere disestablishment, not
easy indeed to formulate, would leave the Church in
the eyes of the country very much what it found it.
Perhaps “My lord” might be more widely
dropped in addressing Bishops; but otherwise, the
aspect of the Church, its daily work, its organisations,
would remain the same, and it would depend on the Church
itself whether the consideration paid to it continues
what it has been; whether it shall be diminished or
increased. The privilege of being publicly recognised
with special marks of honour by the State has been
dearly paid for by the claim which the State has always,
and sometimes unscrupulously, insisted on, of making
the true interests of the Church subservient to its
own passing necessities.

But there is no haziness about the meaning of disendowment.
Property is a tangible thing, and is subject to the
four rules of arithmetic, and ultimately to the force
of the strong arm. When you talk of disendowment,
you talk of taking from the Church, not honour or
privilege or influence, but visible things, to be measured
and counted and pointed to, which now belong to it
and which you want to belong to some one else.
They belong to individuals because the individuals
belong to a great body. There are, of course,
many people who do not believe that such a body exists;
or that if it does, it has been called into being
and exists simply by the act of the State, like the
army, and, like the army, liable to be disbanded by
its master. But that is a view resting on a philosophical
theory of a purely subjective character; it is as